


Journies

by sparxwrites



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Fallen Angels, Fallen Castiel, Post-Season/Series 08 Finale, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-16
Updated: 2013-08-16
Packaged: 2017-12-23 07:25:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/923553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sparxwrites/pseuds/sparxwrites
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Castiel meets the first of his fallen siblings in a church.</p>
<p>(Or, the one where a Fallen Castiel travels around the USA, meeting his siblings and looking for his family.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Journies

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [this post](http://sparxflame.tumblr.com/post/51413478312/some-guys-just-cant-hold-their-arsenic-siterlas), because the idea was too beautiful to leave alone, and my fic really doesn’t do it justice

Castiel meets the first of his fallen siblings in a church.

He doesn’t know where it is. After the lights in the sky had faded, his brothers and sisters all landed for good or ill, he had begun walking – picked a direction and walked, a straight line, for hours on end until his thighs ached and his feet were rubbed raw. The empty space where his wings used to be is a dull ache, and he walks with a curious forward-leaning shuffle, struggling to adjust to walking without wings; what was once enough force to balance out the extra weight on his back is now an overcompensation that leaves his posture rounded and uncomfortable.

The church is old, looking to be unused, on the outskirts of a small collection of buildings barely worthy of being called a village. He knows that, somewhere amongst those buildings, there is likely someone who will lend him a telephone, a bed for the night, food. There is likely someone who will help.

He doesn’t go to any of the buildings.

Inside the church, past a door that opens soundlessly despite the age of the building, heavy oak swinging easily beneath his fingertips, is a girl. Scarcely more than fourteen, blonde with a stripe of blue running down the left hand side of her hair, head bowed and shoulders rounded.

Castiel goes to her, sits beside her. She is crying, wet tears rolling in fat droplets down her cheeks as she stares at the pressed-together palms of what was once her vessel, eyes unseeing. She makes no noise, doesn’t move other than the slow expand-contract of her ribs, just sits and stares and cries. Castiel can understand that.

He does not try to comfort her. What has happened to them, what has been done to them, is beyond comfort, beyond help. To offer empty reassurances, useless platitudes and promises, would be beyond offensive.

They sit together, in silence, until the sun rises – an hour or so, maybe more. The stillness of the church makes the passing of time an ephemeral thing, soft and malleable; terrifying, for a being that was once intimately aware of the passing of each second, counted every minute within its very Grace.

(Everything about being human is terrifying though, how flat and empty it is compared to being an angel, their inferior senses and abilities and minds, and how rich, the intensity of emotion and understanding and  _need_. It makes Castiel a little giddy, a little nauseous.)

As the sun peeks over the horizon,  red and gold and glorious, his sister stands. “His will be done,” she says, quietly, tears tracked wet down reddened cheeks, but her eyes are closed. “His will. If this is his will, what kind of a Father is he?”  
Castiel has no answer to that. He says nothing.

“I do not want that kind of Father,” she continues, eyes raised to the crucifix on the wall, to the faded red of the blood painted onto the wood. “I do not want a Father who abandons me in my time of need. I- I want a loving Father. The Father the archangels told us he would be.”  
“The archangels lied,” says Castiel, heavily, because that much is true – they all lied, other than maybe Lucifer, who spoke the truth but with so much poison in his words he blinded others to it. “Go and find your own family.”

“How?” she asks, raising a hand to wipe lingering droplets off her cheeks. Her eyes are red, but determined, full of a new purpose. “How do I do that?”  
Castiel shrugs. “I do not know.” His family had found him, all on its own – and then abandoned him, over and over, rejected him and re-embraced him so many times he no longer knows where he stands. “But you will know when you find it.”

She nods, back straight and shoulders strong, gaze turned to look out the window. “Thank you.”

“Good luck,” offers Castiel, as she turns and walks from the house of their Father. “Good luck.” He would offer her a blessing, but he does not think she would appreciate the gesture.

-x-

“Worship God?” asks the angel with the teenage vessel, shaking their head and laughing, sliding down the wall of the alleyway and settling next to Castiel in amongst the nest of cardboard boxes and newspaper he has built for himself, poor protection against the cold. “Ha! They may as well worship the faces they see on the television for all the good it does. The angels of Constantine and Dogma and Legion are more angels than we are now. ‘Heaven is empty and all the angels are here’. Ha ha.”

-x-

He next meets a sibling in a coffee shop in New York, three of them, sat around a table in the corner and talking quietly over cups with steam curling over the lip of them. Despite the lowness of their voices, their gestures are excited, passionate, the subject they are discussing obviously close to their hearts.

Castiel walks over to them, cup of coffee clutched tight in one hand, a plate with a single smarties cookie in the other. “May I join you?”  
They nod, welcome him, smile and don’t ask his name before returning to their discussion.

“The New Testament teaches us that Jesus was His son,” says one, an elderly man with the white haze of blindness over his eyes. Castiel’s heart breaks a little for his brother, once able to fly between planets with a thought, now trapped in the sightless, crumbling shell of a body.  
Another, looking to be in her mid-twenties, shakes her head, eyes bright with passion as she puts a hand over the brown, wrinkled skin of the old man’s hand. “But the prophet Muhammad,  _alahi al-salat wa al-salam_ , reveals him to be a prophet. Who are we to believe? Both texts use the name of our Father. Both truths were revealed to humanity through our Father’s works. Who is right?”

“There was no contradiction, before I became fallen,” says the third member of their party, a young boy of maybe nine. He sits close to the older man, clutching anxiously at his sleeve, and if Castiel did not know better he would assume them to be grandchild and grandfather. “It was God’s work, God’s wishes, and so it was all truth. Now… as a human, I cannot… there can only be one truth. Both things cannot exist as one. Who is right?”

“Jesus,” says the old man. “Christianity is the truth. Look to the Bible as your guide.”  
“Muhammad,  _alahi al-salat wa al-salam,_ disagrees,” says the woman respectfully. “I choose to put my faith in him.” To the child, she says, “I will take you to a mosque, some time. You should be educated in all the religions of this Earth before you make a decision.”

The old man sighs, but dips his head in agreement, and the child smiles. “I would like that.”

“You wear no hijab,” points out Castiel after a moment – his coffee drunk, cookie eaten other than a few crumbs that he mops up by licking his thumb and pressing them against white porcelain before bringing it to his mouth. “Why?”

“I wish to learn more about my faith before doing so,” she tells him, smiling. “It is a big step to take. I am not sure that I am yet ready.”  
Castiel nods, and stands. “Good luck,” he says, as he had months ago to his sister in the church. “To all of you.”

“ _Assalamu alaikom_ ,” says his sister, dipping her head. “I hope you find what it is you are searching for soon, brother.”

He does not ask them how they know he is a traveller – he does not need to. His clothes are worn and sun-bleached, old, scavenged from charity shops with what little money he has been able to make on odd jobs. His hair is a touch too long, unkempt, and despite his best efforts to keep clean he knows he is not.

“Our Father’s blessings be upon you,” says his elderly brother. “My thoughts will be with you.”  
“Good luck,” says the child, simply, and waves to Castiel as he leaves the shop. “Have fun.”

-x-

A few days later, he meets another of his siblings on the road; her vessel middle aged but still strong, of Asian descent, with a sheet of dark hair that drops to her shoulders, shining in the light of the afternoon sun. He slows his car – stolen, hot-wired like Dean taught him, though his heart aches knowing he has deprived someone somewhere of something they may desperately need – and stops beside her, leaning out the window. “Do you need a lift?”

“No thank you, brother,” she answers, a bright smile on her lined face, hoisting her backpack a little higher on her shoulders. “I am on a pilgrimage. Accepting a lift would spoil the journey.”  
“A pilgrimage? To where?” He knows of no holy routes leading down back roads in the middle of Ohio.

“Does it matter?” she asks, and laughs. He supposes it doesn’t.  
“Good luck,” he offers.  
“And the same to you!” she calls after him, waving wildly as his car accelerates to the horizon.

-x-

A large group of his siblings find him, this time, a week or so later. There are more of them than he realised – he comes across fallen angels wherever he goes, no matter how far. Or maybe they come across him. Maybe it is destiny and not chance.

He’s curled up in the back seat of his car, jacket pulled tight around his shoulders and blanket draped over his legs; no money for a motel room, no way to find money for a motel room. The seats of his car are hard, the small space inside of it cold despite the heat of Castiel’s body warming it, but it’s better than nothing. Better than the first few nights he’d spent freezing on the ground, nothing more than his clothes to protect him, rain lashing down from above. He’d never realised how much  being cold could  _hurt_ , before that.

There’s a knock at the window, and he looks up, surprised and wary. There’s a knife beneath the bundled-up shirt he’s using as a pillow, and his hand curls around the hilt of it, just in case. He’s learnt quickly that suspicious is better than sorry.

The face at the window is difficult to make out in the dark, skin as dark as the night around it and hair cut short to their head, and Castiel has to squint through the condensation gathering on the window to make out the face of his sister. “Brother!” she calls joyfully, waving, white teeth a flashing gleam.  “Come with us!”

He opens the door slowly, peers out at them all – nine or ten in total, men and women of all ages and colours, laughing and talking, some voices rising occasionally in a shout or in song Castiel doesn’t understand the words of. “Come with us,” repeats his sister. “We have somewhere for you to rest in warmth, and with a full stomach.”

“Yeah!” calls another voice. “C’mon, it’ll be fun!” A chorus joins up behind him, other voices encouraging and bribing – not that they need to. Warmth and food are enough to convince Castiel to join their group.

They jostle and cajole and pull him along, laughing, to the local bar, seat him at a table. The owner looks at them all with raised eyebrows, but says nothing. Their orders are taken – alcohol and heavy food, fizzy drinks for some younger members, crisps and peanuts while they wait. There is an atmosphere of party around them, and Castiel does not understand why he has been brought along if this is a private party.

“Why are you here?” he asks them, looking around – the bar is nondescript, typical, and it is a Wednesday night. As far as he knows, Wednesday nights are not traditional ones for feasting and celebration amongst humans.

“To meet with Odin!” they tell him. “The All-Father has invited us to a great party here. He wishes to talk to us, they say.”  
“He’s going to offer us a place in his religion,” cries one.  
“Why shouldn’t we become pagan, after Dad abandoned us?” asks another.  
“It’s what Gabriel did,” a third reminds them, even though Gabriel is now dead and his decisions do not seem like good ones to copy. “If it’s good enough for an archangel, it’s good enough for us.”

He leaves shortly after that. He has no desire to meet with a demigod, no desire to sit and get drunk and sing old fighting songs with his siblings in the dark smokiness of the bar as the owner side-eyes them and they wait for Odin’s presence. He has no place at this party, not when his own journey calls him onwards.

“Good luck,” he tells them all, before he goes.  
“And the same back atcha!” one of them yells, a girl with curly hair and bushy eyebrows. “Go get ‘em, bro!”

He’s not sure exactly what she means, but he takes it as a wish of good will towards him, and leaves.

-x-

“You have lost faith, brother!” a sibling reprimands him, balding and overweight and middle age, shaking his head as Castiel walks by the old church – car broken down and abandoned in the middle of the woods somewhere, back on foot now with just the backpack in his back and the thoughts of family in his head. “Come, join our service. Take communion, pray to our Father. Remember where you came from.”

Castiel shakes his head. “No, thank you. I am on a journey, I do not have time. But good luck with your congregation, brother. Lead them well.”  
“I will pray you will one day find the strength to walk with God again,” sighs his brother, shaking his head.

Castiel nods, and walks away.

-x-

His siblings are everywhere. He sees them heading into churches as he drives past, sees them dropping to their knees and facing towards Mecca to pray in the middle of public parks. They stand on street corners with flyers pronouncing the end of days or inviting people to join in pagan celebrations at local holy spots.

They appear on television, discussing politics and religion, arguing passionately in the name of atheism, in the name of the right to wear hijabs in public, in the name of minority religions. They talk on documentaries about the evolution of Hinduism throughout the ages, about what drew them to Buddhism in the first place, about how beautiful the burial rites of Zoroastrianism are. They find themselves in every walk of faith and belief – from Christianity to Satanism, Hinduism to Pagan mythology, atheism to Judaism.

Castiel sees them, everywhere, finding their faith again, in whatever it is they have chosen. They have beliefs – in God or gods or goddesses, in science or in man or in self – and they stick to them, fight for them, believe passionately and wholeheartedly. Angels, even fallen ones, are not given to apathy.

He himself has no religion, does not champion atheism or theism or agnosticism, has no political party or cause that he fights for. He, alone, out of the angels is apathetic when it comes to matters of belief – or so he likes to think, anyway.

After all, he has no time for gods or goddesses. He is too busy, on a journey, searching for his family. For Sam and Dean.


End file.
